The lack of a single feature can irritate a car buyer
For those of you who might not know, I have a little human who has just entered my life and as a responsible, sort of, car reviewer, I bought a child seat to ferry around. For those of you who care about such things, I actually have two child seats but the seat in question right now is the Britax B-35. Britax is one of the top-rated child seat manufacturers and I was fortunate enough to have found a slightly used seat even in the midst of the lockdown. One reason I bought this particular seat is because it has ISOFIX connectors. Again, for those of you who don’t know and have wondered what those ISOFIX signs on your rear seats are, well, those are metal loops that connect into the seat (sometimes even the body) structure of the car. In case of the unlikely chance of an accident, prevent the seat from moving around too much and keeping it secure.
Today, even in a country like India where child seats are not mandatory, ISOFIX loops are standard fitment in most 10-lakh rupee plus cars, even many cheap and cheerful hatchbacks have ISOFIX loops. So when I got the Ford Endeavour Sport for a test drive I took little human’s seat to the car to fit it as the family had planned an outing to Sundar Nursery. You will get my sense of surprise when after searching high and low on the rear seat where I could not find the loops, usually ISOFIX harness points are clearly marked with an ‘ISOFIX’ logo or just an image (as in the Gloster) but it was not there. That should not have really surprised me given that my wife’s 2018 Ford EcoSport Trend+ Automatic didn’t have ISOFIX, but that was a mid-spec car from a couple of years ago. A `35 lakh car not having these harnesses today is a horrible negative.
Thankfully for little human, most car seats also have a secondary seat-belt attachment mechanism and that was used to attach his seat. But that is built so that you can use the seat in older-generation cars, not on a brand-new special edition. While truth be told, I would not have cared about the lack of ISOFIX harnesses six months ago, today I do. Here is the thing, it is neither an expensive or a major fix and one would have assumed Ford, a global car company would do a bit better. I was really, really disappointed.
As for the car? Well, it is blacked out everywhere. I’m not a huge fan of blacked-out vehicles, since we do live in North India which tends to be very hot. If you remember your middle-school physics black paint absorbs heat more effectively than any other colour, which is why most aircraft are white since they get a lot of solar radiation. But then blacked-out cars portray a self-important image very effectively. So yeah, if you don’t have child seats and are extremely image conscious, you could consider this, because it is just a special edition and similar to the 2020 Ford Endeavour.
On another note, this was the first time I drove Ford’s ten-speed gearbox on the Endeavour. While I cribbed and cried about the four-speed automatic on the 2020 Maruti-Suzuki S-Cross, this felt like overkill since in city traffic, I never got past fifth, well there was this small stretch on the Delhi-Noida Flyway where I hit seventh. I like the Endeavour. I like the fact that it has a proper low-range gearbox and can do proper off-roading. But this gearbox, while it claims to make the car more efficient just didn’t do it for me. Then again, it did get my mind off the other major thing I’ve been rattling on about on top.
